Noticing my patterns of story-telling over the past few days, I was struck both by the pervasiveness of these narratives, and, at times, their compelling force. And yet, like bubbles, when “touched” they also seem to pop in mid-air: nothing much at all.
We do not often “touch” our thoughts and stories in this way, however, and then they seem to impel us with the force of a strong river current. (I say “seem,” acknowledging that I’m telling another story here!) But this is what I found more than once this week: myself in action, carried on the force of a narrative, and only afterwards becoming aware of the way in which my body, speech, and mind had all been swept up in its currents. Sometimes the compelling story was innocuous, as when I found myself laughing out loud as I walked down the street, caught up in a memory of a funny incident at work. Sometimes it was more like an automatic reflex or preprogram, as when I heard a whirring noise behind me and I stepped quickly out of the way, expecting a car behind me and then seeing it was a bicycle. The action took place without conscious deliberation, but looking back I could see the immediate chain of associations, a narrative string of images, that was “implicated” in the reflex. Functionally embodied story.Â
But at other times, the narrative and its consequences were neither innocent nor helpful, as when I found myself reflexively dismissing my son after a small incident. I had called him over to look at something, and when he came, he ended up knocking some important papers on the floor and scattering them. At first, I ignored that, trying several times to direct his attention to something fleeting I wanted him to see before it was gone, but he was focused on the papers and wouldn’t look. Suddenly, irrationally, I found myself telling him just to forget the papers and to go away. He went away, a bit hurt and confused, and I immediately looked at what had led to my sudden reaction. The “story” present here was a primal one: the hurt of being ignored, of not being listened to. But the story was also a deeply buried one, and it showed up in me more as a bodily state than a verbal train of thought. Deeply entrenched, it acted through me unconsciously – another embodied story: “People ignore me and do not value me.”
When I attempt to re-live the incident, I see how shrunken my awareness was at that moment. It seems like it was restricted to a small space immediately around my body; I actually was not seeing my son as I spoke to him, but only my pointing finger. Time pressed on me with an unyielding urgency: there was only one option open, to push away. I am reminded of Tarthang Tulku’s description, in Knowledge of Time and Space, of the intensification of time and the indensification of space: here, this primal story enacted a restricted time and space that allowed for no alternatives. I replayed a charged, hurtful childhood experience, and created a new one for my son. (I have spoken to him since then and apologized for sending him away so abruptly.)
Beyond these three incidents, I noticed (and reflected on) the interplay of stories on a number of different levels throughout the week. Often, I found myself weaving together memories and expectations into various justifying, clarifying, or reassuring narratives – finding substance in them, a place to “be.” Sometimes I would notice, while watching this activity, that “stories” appeared to me as thin, transparent overlays on top of the “reality” of the moment – the concrete situation in which I found myself. So I would take a step back and look for the “story” in that reassuring solidity, sometimes experimenting with ways to challenge it too: saying, “This is a dream” (as I used to do when I practiced dream yoga) or “This is a story.” I practiced shifting perspectives, and reflected on the ways that Wilber’s “quadrant perspectives” could be seen as different narrative streams, different ways of “storying” the world.
While listening to the radio, I marveled at the stories about Obama I was hearing from right-wing radio hosts and callers – how they saw him as menacing and cunning, a Manchurian candidate with plans to destroy the country. Just an hour earlier, I had been listening to a Hindi song praising Obama as a “treasure of virtue” and a symbol of hope for the world. What stories we weave! How they sustain and guide us, and how they carry us away.
~ Bruce
In my post above, I reported on a number of the different “levels” and contexts in which I found story-telling to be playing itself out, but I didn’t unpack these instances or offer much comment on how I understand them within a TSK context, so (at Michael’s prompting) I’d like to do that here. Or begin to do so. Because I have the sense, at the moment, of standing on the edge of vista which I have glimpsed as a whole, but which I have not yet teased apart in a way that I can clearly describe or articulate.
As I mentioned above, taking the time this past week to attend to the various ways I “tell stories,” I felt on more than one occasion that I was essentially entering into the territory of Cognitive-Behavioral or Narrative Therapy — mining for the core beliefs and cognitive frames that shape and guide my experience. In CBT, the aim would be to identify and relinquish maladaptive cognitions, replacing them with more functional ones. This exercise in itself can be quite powerful and healing. I believe the TSK inquiry we followed this week could certainly serve these aims (once I was able to perceive maladaptive or “outdated” stories at work, I had the opportunity to frame new narratives, new interpretations), but it’s clear the focus of TSK is a little different: it encourages investigation and identification not only of the particular historical stories we tell, but of certain meta-stories that appear to support these narratives — stories of substance and identity. How do they play out in our lives? How does their enactment impact us and our well-being?
The attached picture (http://brucealderman.gaia.com/photos/view/476723) is a cross-section from a tree — a well-known symbol for enfolded history, for the embodiment of narrative, like tangled lines of braille. In so many ways, we also embody the narratives of our lives, in the shapes and lines of our faces; the light and movement of our eyes; the scars and tensions of our bodies; the habits and patterns of our speech, and the metaphors we use; the images that arise unbidden to mind; the states that wash over us and color our experience or inform our action; the clothes we wear and the relationships we form and the paths we pursue in the world. In focusing on story, rather than “memory” or “thought,” I experience these dimensions of my being, not merely as static texts or recordings of a given past, but as active pronouncements — multi-dimensional enactments of narrative streams, like an oral story line, repeating yet never quite the same, catching me up each time it is told anew.
In my post above, I described the embodiment of narrative on the level of reflex: practically, allowing me to respond appropriately to an oncoming vehicle; dysfunctionally, leading me to irrationally and painfully push away my son. I mentioned them because the focus this week is on how the interplay of stories appears to lead in the direction of substance, of a particular dimensionalized space of meaning or experience, with the limitations that entails. In the case of the reflex, this is especially apparent. In re-enacting my childhood story of feeling ignored (un-valued), I found myself bound in a very tight time-space-knowledge configuration, one which radically altered my experience during its re-telling. From a CBT perspective, I could call the buried beliefs behind this reaction to light, question them, and perhaps find more appropriate ones to replace them. But I believe TSK asks us also to look at the relationship of story-telling itself to the “architecture” of emergent experience, suggesting that stories, in establishing the dimensions of “how things are,” yet remain unestablished, non-dimensional.
In other words, I can learn to challenge a particular story and replace it with a more convincing one; but can I also shift my relationship to story-ing, learn to somehow apprehend emergent story as story (neither dismissing it nor attempting to contrast it with something “more real”)? This is a key question I am interested in exploring and hopefully better understanding through this course.
Hi, Michael, thank you for your comments. It’s interesting — I had just logged on to the site to see if I still had the ability to delete this post. I was wanting to do so because I felt it was mostly just a pedestrian “reporting” and didn’t embody much inquiry. I wanted to go back to the drawing board and find a different way to express this, a way that does reflect more of the potential that I think TSK represents. But the exercise this week actually did just call us to “observe” stories, so I recognize that more may not have been required. I just was not satisfied.
I do think TSK offers more than just a reminder to be a bit more aware of our reflexes and conditioning. Part of what I was thinking about this week, but did not discuss, was that I felt throughout the exercises that I was entering the territory of Cognitive-Behavioral psychology or Narrative psychology — mining in the deep narrative frames and reflexes of my life (something I’ve done before, as I resonate with this way of looking). CBT and similar approaches offer ways to question the “necessity” (the substance) of particular beliefs or stories, and help us to find new expressions. The TSK work this week offers a similar opportunity, but it seems to me it does more than that as well. Or it promises to, as you know.
In my life, the “result” of TSK so far has been a bit more mindfulness, a bit less tight of a hold on my positions and beliefs, a more open sense of possibility and being. But in terms of the TSK story, my belief is it invites even more of a change, but if such a change is really possible, I have no idea.
Thank you for your questions, Michael.
Warm wishes,
Bruce
Hi Bruce,
The stories you share are so vivid and recognizabnly human that it’s not obvious that they are the kinds of mental arising which create a false belief in substance. One would always want to step aside when a mechanical whirring is sensed approaching behind us (whether it is from a bicycle or a car). One would want to feel the rebounding arrival of generational wounds propagating through our life (and I wish I could be as aware as you seem to be of how mine affect my sons), and recognize our own flawed projection onto another, as you did. Since our TSK readings have been about how such mental arisings create a false sense of substance, and how this in turn causes the disappearance of our opportunity to be free, I find myself wondering how the stories you have told block those happier possibilities. You sound like you are often present to the opportunities of your life, and catch youself in some of your more conditioned responses to it. Do you think that TSK offers us something more than a reminder to be aware a bit more often? Do you think that by becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves, and of how we almost constantly turn away from a living presense by labelling and boxing everything for some deadend warehouse of experience–that these tendencies thereby lessen?–Michael